News

Over the past week I’ve been lucky enough to meet AppChallenge community members in Manchester and London at our #EULife Meetup series. It was great to meet people who are passionate about open data. I wish we had been able to travel further across Europe so if you’re not from the UK, please don’t think we don’t care about you, we do! In fact I’ve made a note of the common questions people had at both events and listed my suggestions here.

Do I have to finish an app or can I just submit an idea?The answer is somewhere in the middle. You need to have an alpha version of your app coded up. Basically enough for us to understand what you’re trying to achieve. We can’t accept just a presentation, but equally you don’t need to have a polished, production-grade app either.

Can I use data from elsewhere, for example, in a mash-up?
Yes! We’d love to see you mix our data with other data sources just make sure that we can easily tell you have used our open data in your app

You say “AppChallenge”, what sort of apps?Our definition is pretty loose. Our tutorials are in Javascript and Python for example. We’ll also accept Web / HTML5 apps.

How does the judging work? We entered a contest run by someone else and they just chose the person who presented best at the final showdown.“Beauty parades” are not our thing. We use an objective system of scoring. Our judges all watch your entry videos and are asked to score your app out of 10 for a variety of questions relating to the judging criteria. We use a reasonably large, odd number of judges and that’s how we arrive at the result. It’s as objective as we can make it and takes away any bias.

What’s actually in this open data?
The best thing to do is use the API data explorer that we’ve written and have a look at the questions that are asked. They range from healthcare to financial affordability. There’s a real spread of data which is what makes this dataset so interesting and for every country in the EU.